Dear High School Senior Who Just Got Rejected From __________,
You got rejected from __________? Don't worry I know someone who goes to __________ and trust me he is a huge jerk.
You are probably full of self-doubt, and your voicemail is probably full of messages from a Marine Corps recruiter who wants to give you a red, white and blue lanyard and a $20,000 bonus if you enlist by the end of the week. Don't worry, this is part of the healing process.
But maybe you should have volunteered at a homeless shelter for narcoleptic dogs or something? Or maybe you should have taken the SAT IV, because honestly do colleges even look at SAT III scores anymore? Or maybe you did take the SAT IV and scored in the 98th percentile, but you were still bombarded with rejection letters because sometimes colleges reject people for no good reason at all? Who knows? But at any rate, these are all good questions that you should constantly be asking yourself for the rest of your life. (If you were rejected by Hobart, at least you got a free pair of three dimensional glasses, which is very post-modern and also very Post cereal.)
Truth is, you're probably better off not going to college. If you want to take out a student loan just to "fit in," that's fine, but you should invest that money in whatever metal or synthetic fiber Ron Paul recommends.
But don't waste your time with college. Seriously, college is for chumps. Instead of spending heaps of money to rot in a dorm for four years, you should trick other people into giving you heaps of money so that they can rot in a dorm for four years while they try to "find themselves" or whatever.
And that's why you should move to the Moon and start your own educational institution, The University of the Moon!
If you build it, high schoolers will come. Okay here's the business plan:
The University of the Moon will offer a "galactic" or "universal" education, which makes "global education"--the meaningless term used by inferior Earth colleges--sound pedestrian and not at all impressive. Students at The University of the Moon will graduate with "a unique perspective on the world"--a perspective from the Moon.
Can you even begin to imagine? College-bound children will be launched into space by their braindead parents at previously unheard-of rates. Everyone will want to come to The University of the Moon to experience its "rich and diverse learning atmosphere." (The Moon does not have an atmosphere but they don't have to know that!) Millions of students eager for a "galactic education" will apply.
Seriously, you will be rich immediately. It will be a turkey shoot--except you will be shooting Moon turkeys, which are even easier to kill than normal Earth turkeys.
Eventually some horrible tabloid will start publishing Moon rankings ("Best Moon Colleges and Universities" or whatever) and that will be annoying, but by then The University of the Moon will have an endowment of 26 billion Moon Rubles--a sum far more enormous than the endowments of other Moon institutions. And because everyone knows that money makes you learn better, The University of the Moon will be ranked the #1 best Moon College each year, every year, forever. (The University of the Moon will also be ranked #1 because it will have the dopest climbing wall, with Moon rocks et cetera.)
Fast-forward twenty years. You never went to college but here you are, founder of a prestigious research university on the Moon. Remember Larry, that sucker from high school who went to Middlebury? He is working two different night jobs--both unpaid internships--in hopes of paying off his student loans by the time he turns 70. But look at you! Debt-free and as rich as chocolate mousse cake. Those twenty years sure went by fast, and a lot has changed--who even knows what's on the SAT XII?
But after twenty years in the higher ed biz, you realize that housing and feeding thousands of children is expensive and boring and a bit of a drag. You could move The University of the Moon to the Internet, but you're thinking of something different, something big, something that would Maximize Efficiency. Maybe Keanu Reeves could download four years of monotonous essay-writing and drunken "soul-searching" into the noodle of every incoming student?
As you sit in your fancy Moon office pondering how many Moon Rubles you would have to pay Keanu Reeves for his brain-download services, millions of nervous teenagers receive rejection letters from The University of the Moon and all the other colleges they applied to.
Encouraged by a silly internet blog, one such teenager moves to Mars and establishes his own educational institution, The University of Mars. Now you're screwed because The University of Mars offers a "martian education" and how can The University of the Moon compete with that? (You are also screwed because Mars has prettier Fall Foliage, which is an important part of the College Experience.)
The University of the Moon goes bankrupt and you are forced to return to Earth. You find out that Sallie Mae repossessed the $200,000 of aluminum Ron Paul tricked you into purchasing all those many years ago. This is especially terrible news because somehow Ron Paul was right about the Dollar collapsing and now everybody is buying stuff with aluminum coins.
So basically: College, no college...you lose either way, the end.
